Winston Churchill famously described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Swaddle those things one more time in a green, gold-fringed robe and you can also apply that phrase to Ben Kingsley’s villain The Mandarin in Iron Man 3.

Except … when the core of the character finally comes to light, we get a revelation that few could have expected from such an iconic comic-book badass.

EW spoke with the filmmakers and can now peel back the four layers of this super-villain twist to show how – and why – it all happened this way …